Group 5 Thoughts and My Thoughts on Meaning

 Our group's idea for teaching Conceiving Ada is to divide the class into small groups and assign certain scenes from the movie that we thought raised interesting ideas to each group and have them re create and film the scene from their own interpretation. "Re- create" would be used very loosely allowing students as much freedom as possible when making their own scene. We thought it a useful exercise when trying to understand a movie to actually try to make one yourself. This idea was inspired by Hayles' critique of critique and call for generating knowledge. Instead of critiquing the movie we would like students to generate their own little movies using themes and questions raised by the film.

Towards the end of class we were discussing meaning and if we thought it impossible not apply our own interpretation of meaning to a text and to let the data speak for its self; to not have meaning matter. I was initially having a hard time with this concept because I thought if there is no meaning what is the point? Also it is impossible to divorce yourself from your pre conceived notions so meaning will always be subjective. However after giving this some thought I think that it could be a very useful exercise to consciously not look for meaning initially. I think what people usually do is create some meaning for a text and then look for proof of that meaning they created rather than just looking at and playing around with raw data first. If you do this you are also making yourself more aware that you have pre conceived ideas and you can try to be more critical of these ideas and open to change.